A History of American Literature

114 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865

virtue, the reader is confronted with a passage of lyric beauty – not denying the

comic framework but actually growing out of it – that serves as a reminder of all

those aspects of Sut Lovingood’s character that mostly remain unexercised. In one

striking episode, for instance, Sut waxes lyrical about a mealtime. In a long passage,

he describes in loving detail a supper that, he recalls, was like “a rale suckit-rider’s

supper, whar the ’oman ’ove the hous’ wer a rich b’lever.” An evocative catalog of all

the food laid out on the table is followed by a description of the woman who has

cooked it all, for Sut and her husband, that combines eroticism and domesticity. The

occasion being described here is mundane enough, certainly, but what matters is all

that Harris allows his protagonist to make out of it. Sut, the reader is forced to

recognize, has a sensitivity – a capacity for recognizing the sensuous beauty and the

value of a particular experience – which will emerge at the least opportunity,

although too often it is left to waste unobserved. The waste is articulated elsewhere

in the narrative, in the scenes of comic violence and degeneracy that illustrate the

actual conditions of his existence. Here there is something different: an instinctive

insight, and wisdom, that align Sut with the ideal of the natural man. Sut voices a

vision, for and of himself, and, at such moments, he is more than just a comic legend.

He is one of the first in a long line of American vernacular heroes who compel the

reader to attend because, the sense is, no matter how poor, stupid, or peripheral they

may appear to be, they and what they have to say deserve attention.

The Making of American Selves

The Transcendentalists

“Our age is retrospective,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) at the beginning

of perhaps his most famous work, Nature (1836). “It builds the sepulchers of the

fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism,” he continued. “The foregoing

generations beheld God and nature face to face, through their eyes. Why should we

not also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” An original relation to the

universe, one founded on self-reliance and self-respect, is the key to the thought and

work of Emerson. It also inspired a number of other writers at the time who saw the

liberation of the self as the American imperative. With Emerson, the inspiration

came after he resigned his position as a Unitarian minister in 1832. He sailed to

Europe, where he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth and began

a lifelong friendship with Thomas Carlyle. Through them, he became intimately

associated with transcendental thought and its sources in German idealism. Later,

Emerson also encountered the influence of the sacred books of the East, the traditions

of Plato and Neoplatonism, and the line of British philosophy that ran through John

Locke, Bishop Berkeley, and David Hume. All these influences served to confirm and

enrich his growing belief in the supreme importance of the individual, the superiority

of intuition to intellect (or, as Emerson was to put it, of “Reason” to “Understanding”),

and the presence of a spiritual power in both nature and the individual human being.

“If we live truly,” Emerson was to write in “Self-Reliance” (1841), “we shall see truly.”

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